Here's something from a heavy Twitter user that could save Twitter:
1) Offer ad freedom. Twitter has IIRC 300M users - if only 10% of these pay 1€ a month, that's 30M a month or 360M a year. Way more than enough to keep the lights on, and maybe even enough to replace lost ad revenue.
2) Open up the app ecosystem again - allow third party clients features like DM pictures and polls. Many people are fed up with the official mobile client.
3) Donald J. Trump. About 25M people follow him, and ad slots on his account should fetch a boatload of money. Not to mention that people sign up for Twitter just to read his latest brain f.rts... these could all be "upconverted" to full-on engaging Twitter users.
Surveys greatly overstate such figures because it is much easier to say "yes I want to pay" than to actually hand over money. Also, I would argue that Facebook is more important for most users than Twitter (their central problem).
and therein lies the problem, 10% of Facebook's MAU is 180 million, that nets them 1.8 billion a year. They made 9 billion dollars last quarter. It doesn't make sense for them to switch to $10 a year.
Even if they show ads to remaining users, most of the paying users are going to end up being avid users of the service who are probably more valuable for ads.
Regarding your first point. 360M is about half of their quarterly revenue. If they aren't able to survive with that amount, how would they survive with 360M a year.
Trying to profit on the backs of regular users won't work for Twitter. Charging a regular fee, loading up on enough ads to keep investors happy, or anything else like that is a quick way to lose a bunch of users. Instead, Twitter need to think like Google or any other ad network. They should charge those who make money by tweeting. The industrial tweeters, the people flogging their sites or albums or hair products or whatever. If you've ever hired a social media consultant, Twitter should be charging you thousands of dollars a year. I'm sure there's some level of "tweets read per week" that would catch Kim K while sparing most high school tech bloggers.
They really do need to do this. Any embedded tweets for Trump/about Trump should automatically have an ad underneath them. They've never had more eye balls on their tweets than now and they should capitalize on that.
I use a third party client (because the official one does not, for example, support multiple accounts) and I never saw ads.
Note this is not the client filtering them out (they'd be banned in an instant) it's just that the API only returns what's actually in my timeline.
Now that I think of it, it's the same with tweetdeck.. so, if you're a power user (the kind who'd be more likely to pay for the service) you already don't see them.
> I use a third party client (because the official one does not, for example, support multiple accounts) and I never saw ads.
Huh? On Android I have three accounts and at least that works fine (given various exceptions, but generally it's OK). Not sure about iPhone client.
> Now that I think of it, it's the same with tweetdeck.. so, if you're a power user (the kind who'd be more likely to pay for the service) you already don't see them.
TweetDeck is a horrible mess for multiple accounts, from a UX perspective...
Twitters yearly revenue is more than 2 billion. So 360 million wouldn't solve their problem.
Twitters problem isn't that they don't make money. They make a lot of money. Their problem is that their stock-valuation means that in the future their investors expect them to make ridiculous amounts of money, and they don't have any obvious way to get there.
1) Offer ad freedom. Twitter has IIRC 300M users - if only 10% of these pay 1€ a month, that's 30M a month or 360M a year. Way more than enough to keep the lights on, and maybe even enough to replace lost ad revenue.
2) Open up the app ecosystem again - allow third party clients features like DM pictures and polls. Many people are fed up with the official mobile client.
3) Donald J. Trump. About 25M people follow him, and ad slots on his account should fetch a boatload of money. Not to mention that people sign up for Twitter just to read his latest brain f.rts... these could all be "upconverted" to full-on engaging Twitter users.